Dance club

I imagine that street life is popular in any city.  Apartments are going to be small and expensive and having people over is most likely a hassel.  In Rochester with a house in the suburbs we can sleep six guests with relative ease, so when there is a party in town we function as a unofficial hotel, which makes sense.  We're kind hosts, we prepare huge delicious meals, the beds are comfortable, and all we require is the sacrifice of your first born son... Wait a minute, I mean a little respect.  Yeah, respect, let's go with that. 

The first reason that drives Spaniards into the streets is the realestate.  The apartment I live in here is the Bel-Air masionette of San Sebastian, there are five bedrooms with enough sleeping room for seven people.  A full three bathrooms, a kitchen, and a main room that takes on the rest of the jobs, from dining room to rollar rink (Because why the hell not).  Every time there is company over, which adds up to a total of twice in three and a half months, they remark on how amazingly huge the house.  If a family has four children and only enough money for a normal sized apartement someone is sleeping on the ground, probably the older brother.  Thus having people over is difficult and any sort of party is impossible, so virtually the whole city leaves their house to party, and one of the biggest party draws is, of course, the dance club.  San Sebastian contains one of the most famous clubs in Spain, Battaplan a discoteca on the beach, it has music, strobe lights, and young sexy people with zero inhibitions, everything necessary to dance like a hallucinating mental patient (which should be everyone's goal when they go out dancing).  When my friends told me how awesomely amazing it was it seemed like a simple choice to go there and party for a night.  I had never been to a club before and had no idea what to expect, especially out of a Spanish one.  I get into a line to enter the club with some friends, we get to the front to find four bouncers who looked like models from Abercrombie and Fitch mixed with clothes from Gentelmen's Quarterly aka Spanish James Bonds.  After taking a couple moments to look us over the head bouncer asked us for invitations, a crushing blow.  If the gaurds decide you are not good looking enough you need to be invited.  I had not realized I was not sexy enough to enter the club on looks alone, and I thought skinny-white-boy was the 'in look' this year.

Half an hour later my friends and I try again this time the bouncers only request twenty euros, my friends egarly offer it up but I'm slightly more skeptical.  They assure me that the party is totally worth it and will be blow my tits off amazing, so I give in, hand over a blue bill (their money is slightly more fabulous than ours) and head inside.  My main reason for entering was because of the dance style I've seen in the U.S and the more European dance style I heard was really popular in, you know, Europe. Although I can do some breakdancing it is not really useful for an extended club period so I was ready to learn from the Spainards. There are two types of club dancing in the U.S; Number one: Bob head up and down to beat with hands in pockets, Number two: Dry humping.  I have seen Germans and French getting their bodies going with the beats and moving their hands in rythem, and that was what I was hoping for from Spain.  In reality it is slightly different, in Spain they have two styles of dance as well, the female version (see French and German dance) and the male version (see head bobbing).  Battaplan was full of people with blasting music, sweet strobe lights, and a huge dance floor.  The thing about all that club set up is that it only looks cool if there is movement with it, instead lights burst all around a stagnant sea of people.  Sure some girls were moving, but come on, this is Europe, my previously established sterotypes dictate that everyone here dances really well.

Instead of learning to dance at clubs I have taken to the refugee of amateurs aspiring for something more, Youtube.  I type in 'how to dance at clubs' and get loads of tutorials, I then sneak away into my room to practice.  I pop in my ipod and set up the video camera on my computer so I can judge my dancing skills later on.  I can see a possibly devestatingly awckward moment where, in a sit-com like scene, I'm dressed in pyjamas, jumping around to music that is only in my head (iPod),  with a video camera watching me, and my host mom walks in to tell me dinners ready.  That will be a sad day, but until then I will keep practicing in my room until I'm good enough to dance at a club.  After all someone has to make a fool of themselves to start a change, and I want that fool to be me.

Surf class

It is rather difficult to justify my original interest in surfing.  After all it is a sport where, without proper protection, a person could freeze to death in a matter of minutes.  There are huge carnivores in the ocean that have eyesight terrible enough to mistake a surfboard with something delicious, like a baby seal.  And the entire point of the sport is to ride a force of nature that easily, and routinely, destroys entire cities.  On the plus side for surfing, it looks really really freakin cool. So I decided that I would not endanger my physical well being and instead would better myself by studying a variety of subjects and considering the meaning of life itself while meditating in an attempt to reach a state of Zen, and that lasted all of about five minutes.  Then I grabbed a surf board and jumped drunken backflop style into the ocean.

My biggest concern going into surf school was not the danger inherent in the sport, but rather the people I would be hanging out with when on the waves.  Surfing looks so BA (BadAss) that I assumed that all manner of faux-cool-person-douche would be there.  As it turns out people who surf are similar to people who rock climb, meaning they are buff studs who can't stop listening to Bob Marley or talking about world peace.  They're all super-hippies, which means, more or less, I fit in almost perfectly.  Instead of just grabbing a surf board, running into the water, and promptly drowning, I decided to enroll in a surf school, where we had lessons like: how to stand up, how to look BA while standing up, how to not drown, and if need be how to look BA while drowning.  At first I had trouble trying to schedule the lessons considering I have this pesky education thing to deal with, but eventually I settled on Sundays at around noon.  I say around noon because like everything else in Spain the time frame for the lessons works on a give or take half an hour basis.  Sometimes I arrive right on time to find out I'm already late, but this is rare.  Much more often our surf teacher walks out of a backroom with a slightly dazed look on his face about fifteen minutes after the start of the lesson and appears surprised that the constraints of the space time continuum still applied to his life.

There are five people in this particular Sunday class and after struggling to wrap ourselves in skin-tight wet suits we head out to the beach with surfboards in hand, having no idea what to expect.  Like a good instructor our teacher wants to show us what to do on land so we don't kill ourselves in the water.  We practice lying on the board, we practice standing up on the board, we do it again, okay, that should be about good enough, let's get out into the water.  Our instructor thought that we probably had enough practice to stand up on a goddamn force of nature, and as it turns out... he was right.  After about fifteen minutes in the water I'm riding waves all the way into shore like freakin aquaman.  Turns out snowboarding is directly linked to surfing in terms of how it feels and muscles used.
After seven classes I have decided that I've had enough education on how to ride waves, I just need to get out there and practice on my own.  The problem is I still have not mastered  the sport, after seven whole classes I was expecting to be winning national surfing championships, but as it turns out I still get flipped over by about a quarter of the waves while children of about 11 ride by my flailing body feeling ashamed to be associated with me in any way.  Now that I've started surfing without supervision I've taken the leap from 'Weenie American trying to learn how to surf by taking classes,' to 'Look at that idiot, he should really still be taking classes. Oh oh hes trying to stand up, oh look look hes, oh no, oh god that looked painful, oh god.  Should we go and check on him?  Oh god, is he all right, oh my... oh wait, wait hes washing up on the beach, hes trying to stand oh hes stumbling hes going down oh man, face first.  Stupid Americans.'  So needless to say I've made progress while functioning as an ambassador to spread good will about the United States.  See Rotary, I remembered.

I do believe that I want to continue with surfing when I get back to the states although I may only be able to do it for special vacations.  Surfing is great fun, but for some reason I thought that when I got better I would slowly start becoming more badass, this has not happened.  After breakdancing, snowboarding, surfing, and scubadiving I'm still just Andrew, what a gyp.  Maybe if I dedicate time to meditation and understanding myself I'll become more comfortable with who I am.  But who has ever impressed a girl by saying, 'I'm comfortable with who I am and where my life is at this point and time.'  I think I need to start skydiving.